Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#71

Post by SuoDuanDao » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

cntrl wrote: post #17

sokoloff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If “we could all” is constrained to households earning 6-figures, I tend to agree. I doubt a household making $30K/yr could realistically live on $10K/yr. (Further, if everyone FIRE’d, growth would slow to the point where you’d need to save more to generate the same income from investments. We’re so far from that being any kind of practical worry, that it can be safely ignored I think, but would be a concern if it be…

Isn't the FIRE person just delaying it's consumption? At some point the saved up money will be spent, therefore I wouldn't expect it to have a huge negative impact on economic growth

It's not delaying but also reducing it significantly - the FIRE person lives on 1/3 a typical income and saves the other two over the course of a compressed career. Typically they retire once they've saved 25X their yearly expenses and then draw down at a rate of 4% a year, putting any excess capital gains towards their portfolios to offset inflation.

So consumption is reduced by 60% over the course of a lifetime, which by most metrics would shrink the economy by a similar amount - of course, most FIRE people also keep being productive after retiring, so it's probably not so straightforward to account for everything.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#72

Post by RandomLensman » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

"Unnecessary" is such an odd category: humans could live in caves, for example. Who determines what is necessary? Is art necessary? Music? Nice food? This seems often tangled in some odd moral/theological origin, i.e. possessions are frowned upon.

I like to be shown new things to try, for example. So some advertising I actually like. Is my life planned by large corporations? From my work there I would say not, as most campaigns tend to fail even in the short term.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#73

Post by goodpoint » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

grumblenum wrote: post #69

goodpoint wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're not forced to do anything You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill or in prison. In various developed societies there is free healthcare, social safety nets, or some forms of UBI or other help. > but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair Fair? Consumerism is threatening all ife on the planet. Humanity can do so much better.

A Malthusian crisis has been “imminent” since the 19th century. I think that you should try writing down what facts you think support the a priori assumption that our sinful ways are leading us to a future, sudden disaster. I don’t think you will find much evidence that isn’t traceable to popular opinion. Sorry, fam, it’s just Puritanism for the modern age.

Are you saying that climate change, ocean depletion, soil depletion, desertification, plastic pollution and food shortage are not real?

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#74

Post by habeebtc » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

quesera wrote: post #29

captainmuon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: What do you think "fashion" is? I used to think there were some very cool, fashion-adept people, who have the ability to predict what will considered modern next year. The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance. It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool". Granted, the industry tries to predict what will be…

It's really not that simple. Fashion is an industry where hundreds of individual designers, some with the backing of megacorps and some without, try to meet popular interest (or to lead it), with production times measured in weeks to months, and with seasonal variation. There is no "fashion cabal" where designers get together for drinks and to anoint "cerulean blue" as the color of 2023 and then pull their customers…

There was a great article years back, on oped by guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani about the death of Shred music.

In short: the way trends work is they get popular and then all the people already doing that thing get popular too.

There is during that time people who jump on the bandwagon. Once the popularity dies off, lots of people keep doing that thing, it just doesn't get the notoriety it did before: it returns to its niche.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#75

Post by deepnotderp » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

namdnay wrote: post #66

slv77 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longer work weeks we’re mostly confined to Industrial Age city populations that didn’t have access to land to farm. Few laborers working in early industrial mills was doing so because it was easier then farming. Agfa, Foraging and hunter-gatherer populations, work about 20 hours per week and transitioning to farming increased working hours. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.h... !Kung spend 4…

And hunter gatherers lived to what age, 40? And you’re skipping a few thousands of years of civilization between hunter gatherers and the industrial revolution. I can guarantee a Roman or medieval farmer worked pretty much every hour of sunlight

> And hunter gatherers lived to what age, 40?

Transitioning to farming is what dropped lifespans.

https://theconversation.com/hunter-gatherers-live-nearly-as-...

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#76

Post by sneak » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #37

notfromhere wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably an argument that a forty hour workweek makes that kind of unnecessary consumption possible. People with time and groceries would probably make dinner rather than go out

I'm not sure about that, even when my wife and I were both working full time we still cooked all our own meals. It's not that much of a burden.

In-person shopping for food (including travel to/from the place of purchase), food prep, cooking, and the associated cleanup is an enormous time sink. Perhaps you have free time or are already used to spending a lot of it on these tasks, but let's not pretend that it's "not that much". It's huge.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#77

Post by SavantIdiot » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

The part in the article about finding time to work out hit hard. He's right: there is so little time to work out because it takes 1hr to work out and 1hr to travel/clean up: 2hrs is a big deal when you only have ~4 hours free hours per day to take care of life. That made me pretty depressed, not just for me but for every overweight person who is being shamed about not exercising. You have to exercise a lot to alter your physique, and cramming that into normal life with a 10hr/day job and kids is brutal.

What's worse: this is from 2010. Pre-microtransation in video games, pre-dozens of $10 TV channels fighting over a few film copyrights, pre-subscription-razors, subscription juice, subscription groceries, subscription everything...

I can't believe people who pay $15/month for one TV channel (Disney+) are shelling out $30 to rent (not own!) the latest blockbuster. Blows my mind.

I'm old enough to remember in the 80's when conservatives blamed poor kids for saving up to buy $100 Air Jordans as some kind of societal ill, when in reality it was just the correct operation of the American consumerism.

Marketing has really upped its game in 40 years.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#78

Post by SavantIdiot » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #2

I've noticed an interesting congruity - people in the FIRE community tend to target saving two-thirds of a modern western income, with most finding that living on less than one-third begins to have serious impacts on quality of life. From some studies I came across while studying sustainable energy it also seems as though a well-designed community in which residents make certain lifestyle choices can reduce resource…

Most people in the FIRE community are still under 50. I'm watching to see how this plays out.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#79

Post by irremediable » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #77

The part in the article about finding time to work out hit hard. He's right: there is so little time to work out because it takes 1hr to work out and 1hr to travel/clean up: 2hrs is a big deal when you only have ~4 hours free hours per day to take care of life. That made me pretty depressed, not just for me but for every overweight person who is being shamed about not exercising. You have to exercise a lot to alter y…

> That made me pretty depressed, not just for me but for every overweight person who is being shamed about not exercising.

FWIW most weight change is due to diet. If you're overweight, exercise is probably a much lower priority than finding a way to sustainably eat less.

I'm not just sounding off here; I lost 20+ kg by tracking what I ate and eating less.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#80

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #5

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. Calculated, like in planned-economy, directive-from-the-top? I disagree. A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll. Purveyors of suc…

You may be being unrealistic about the role of spontaneous personal choice in this.

To a surprising extent, people find things pleasurable because they're told to find them pleasurable.

No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to.

People buy new phones because they're somehow "cool". No one is really sure why, but it's something that happens.

There used to be an element of spontaneous creativity in trends. Traditionally industry noted the trends and sold them back to customers.

But it's easier and cheaper to skip the organic and spontaneous part and sell trends top-down by linking them to perceptions of social status.

This is done by key players inside the relevant industries instead of by a Politburo of fat elderly men. But it's still heavily bureaucratic and centralised. Just in a cool way.

It also creates economies of scale, which is both convenient and useful.